


A trail with no end in sight

by rivkat



Category: Fringe
Genre: Canonical Character Death, Eight crazy nights, F/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-06-18
Updated: 2012-06-18
Packaged: 2017-11-08 01:28:45
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 566
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/437624
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/rivkat/pseuds/rivkat
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Prompt: from monanotlisa: Marble House: The moment we believe that we have never met/Another kind of love it's easy to forget.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A trail with no end in sight

**Author's Note:**

  * For [monanotlisa](https://archiveofourown.org/users/monanotlisa/gifts).



“I was going to miss you,” she says when it’s over and the gate is closed.  
  
Fine: she says it in her head. She means it, though. The other Olivia hadn’t had a Lincoln, which was one of many things she hadn’t had, along with a sense of humor. That Olivia worked in a basement—not a Fringe Division building, not even an FBI building—and she didn’t have the security of a whole government striving to save the world together. Secrecy had its appealing features (as her own masquerade had taught her), but there’d been something missing. More than the ability to use her show-me to get any kind of help she needed from the locals, _Lincoln_ had been missing. Charlie had been dead, and that was a different kind of horrible and creepy, but Lincoln—  
  
She’d looked him up, even though it had been a security risk. FBI agent, dorky picture—she almost smiles even now, thinking about how Lincoln had pointed out the tragedy he’d narrowly avoided by being part of the right timeframe. Except that’s a dangerous road; there had been so much lost because of them, and while she was over there she only contained her fury by focusing on all the _things_ the intruders had that Olivia’s world didn’t—coffee and carrots, Persian cats and the Mona Lisa. If she thought too hard about the human costs, she just wanted to take a knife to each and every one of them. So maybe comparison isn’t going to be a great idea even now that the option of filleting the alternate Walter Bishop like a farmed salmon is no longer on the table. Alternate Lincoln had seemed like a dutiful, if kind of boring, person. A little bit like alternate Olivia, in that way.  
  
But now she’d gotten to know him, this guy who hadn’t watched his world freeze and break off into amber chunks. And he looked at her like he wanted to know her. She’d spied on his colleagues, yes, but that was before his time, and the other Olivia hadn’t been able to convey her revulsion to him. Also, Olivia was damned charming, if she did say so herself, and she thought even boring Olivia had been softening on her anyway.  
  
There were ten reasons that she and Captain Lincoln Lee never would have worked. But those were gone and buried, and this was Lincoln’s new world.   
  
“Hey,” she says, and he looks up from the tablet he’s studying like he’ll get kicked off the planet if he doesn’t absorb all the differences immediately. “Do you like Thai?” A question she’d never asked Lincoln. This time is the first.  
  
He hesitates, maybe wondering what Thai is like on this side of the divide. “I could be persuaded,” he says.  
  
She smiles at him, and he looks up at her with a kind of hope she’s just started to see in the other faces around her. Like maybe he thinks the multiverse has a continuing plan for him, and it’s not a terrible one. “I’ll come and grab you at six, then.”  
  
He’s watching her as she leaves: she can feel it.   
  
Walter said once, back when she was infiltrating, ‘there’s more than one of everything.’ That’s not true. This is not the Lincoln Lee she knew for years. He’s someone else.  
  
That doesn’t mean he can’t be hers.


End file.
